


Metamorphic Petrology

by Ladybug_21



Category: The Broken Earth Series - N. K. Jemisin
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Post-Canon, Rebuilding, Stone Eaters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:47:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28275558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: After the Seasons end, Alabaster watches Essun slowly rebuild from the ashes.
Relationships: Alabaster & Damaya | Essun | Syenite
Comments: 12
Kudos: 31
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Metamorphic Petrology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JessicaJones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessicaJones/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, JessicaJones! I realize you may have been looking for a story about Alabaster in all of his sassy tenringer glory, but I hope you don't mind an angst-leaning story about Essun slowly encouraging his stone eater self to piece together who he was. Hope you're staying safe and making the best of the end of this hellish year.
> 
> I obviously own no rights to _The Broken Earth_ trilogy, which is wholly and entirely the property of the brilliant N. K. Jemisin.

He does not recognize the ocher-marbled newcomer, who appears hand-in-hand with the stone eater that appears as a young man (black marble crackled through with white veins). The one who has bound herself to him—the woman of white porcelain who forged him anew and was waiting for him when he emerged from the crystal of his geode—looks at the newcomer with no surprise, then turns to the man of black marble.

"So, you were successful."

"Yes," replies the man of black marble, and there is something unusual in the vibrations of his tone, something that is vaguely recognizable as both relief and pride. "She remembers so much."

"Unnecessary," the woman of white porcelain points out. "You still think like a human, and you never even really were that."

"Humans know joy," answers the man of black marble, gracefully masking whatever pain her words have caused, although the stone around him pulses with the slightest tremor of bitterness. "They create happiness out of doing things that go beyond necessity. Why should we not do the same?"

The newcomer has watched this entire interaction with a look of polite bemusement on her still face. Since the man of black marble has slipped his hand out of hers to address the woman of white porcelain, she has crossed her smooth arms in a manner that is strangely _human_ (the woman of white porcelain never falls into such oddly casual gestures). He finds it distasteful, as if she is still trying to cling to what she previously was, instead of embracing what she now is.

And yet. There is something unnervingly familiar to the sight of her standing there, arms crossed, head tilted, lips slightly pursed. It is as if he has encountered her form in the past, although he cannot fill that form with meaning. He perceives her as he would perceive the negative space that would be left in a block of ocher marble with her figure hewn out.

With a start, he notices that her eyes have shifted in his direction.

"I was warned that you wouldn't remember me"—and the vibrations of her stone speech too throb with familiarity. "Do you?"

He does not respond immediately, and something like hope fixes itself in her expression at his silence.

"No," is the answer he gives, but she still smiles.

"There will be time," she reassures him.

When she takes his milky hand, it's as if grains of sand blown by the wind suddenly shift in his consciousness, and then lie still again. He does not like that he does not understand it. But, for reasons he cannot understand, he trusts her.

"Antimony's jealous," the newcomer comments, watching the other two stone eaters, and when he follows her gaze, he too sees the displeased expression on the face of the stone eater who has guarded him all this time. "Hoa probably is, too, but he won't mind, as long as I pay him as much attention as he deserves." She looks back at him. "I need to find someone. Multiple people, really. It will be easier to do with help. Come with me?"

He knows that his guardian will not like it if he leaves her, but it will not be forever, and for reasons he cannot understand, he _wants_ to help the newcomer who speaks to him with such familiarity. He nods, and she grins.

"Thank you, 'Baster," she whispers through the earth, and although her appellation means nothing to him, he feels the promise in the vibrations of her voice.

* * *

Together, they listen to the tremors of the earth until the newcomer is able to sess the humans she seeks. The Rifting has been sealed, but ash continues to blot out the Sun and the Moon alike on the surface; all vegetation has withered, the rain still falls sharp with acid, and lifeforms grown increasingly feral scamper through the desolate landscape. Everything changes in a Season, and even if the Season's source has been stopped, the changes linger.

When they find the humans, they are gaunt and weak, their ribs showing through their clothes. The newcomer watches them silently, her expression unreadable. Then, suddenly, one of the humans turns with a glassknife in her hand, inches forward through the ash-dense air until she can see the stone eater clearly, and stops dead in her tracks.

"Evil Earth!" she gasps. "Essun!"

The woman staggers forward and clasps the stone eater's outstretched marble hand. She jumps a bit at the coldness of the stone, but then laughs, her eyes crinkling behind her goggles as she drinks in the sight of her friend's face.

"Tonkee Innovator Dibars," intones the stone eater whose human name was Essun, her mouth curled into a smile, and the woman nods, the hollowness of her cheeks making her smile stretch even larger.

"You remember," whispers Tonkee. "Rust it, it really _is_ you."

She turns, her billowy pantaloons whipping around her ankles, and shouts over her shoulder.

"Hjarka! Danel! Where have you both disappeared to? Look who it is! Oh, and Essun," she adds, turning back towards the stone eater with an eager look in her eyes, "I don't expect that you enjoyed full consciousness while being eaten and then reborn as a stone eater, but if you _do_ remember anything about how the entire process worked..."

Others are appearing through the ash, indistinct outlines solidifying into more haggard forms. There is a woman with a frame that's clearly lost a lot of muscle mass through her recent starvation, her lips painted black. Another woman with teeth filed to points, her clothes sagging from limbs too thin to fill them out. They, too, stare at the ocher-marble woman in wonder; then the woman with filed teeth claps her on the back, while the woman with her lips painted black begins mumbling under her breath, her eyes locked on the scene before her.

"Where is Nassun?" asks the stone eater called Essun finally.

The other women glance at each other nervously through the ash.

"She took a deep wound, the last time we had to fight off a band of commless," explains the pointy-toothed woman finally.

"Is she alive?" Essun presses.

"Just barely," says Tonkee grimly.

Essun makes a noise that it takes him a moment to recognize as a sigh of impatience.

"I will never forgive Hoa for not taking you all straight back to Castrima," she tells her friends. "Bring me to her. 'Baster and I will take you all back to the comm."

"He's here, too?" asks the pointy-toothed woman, and she squints through the falling ash until she finally notices his pale stone form through the dense flurry of white and gray. "Earthfires, so he is. Not that I suppose I'm really surprised, at this point. Nice to see you all in one piece, I guess?"

He does not know how to respond to this, so he remains silent and motionless.

"Take me to my daughter," Essun orders. When she sees the girl, trembling with fever under her dirty blankets, she gathers the long-limbed teenager into her arms in the blink of an eye, her solid stone arms creating an awkward cradle. "Everyone, take hold of me or Alabaster. Let's get you home."

* * *

The journey to Rennanis-which-is-now-Castrima does not take long, but the erstwhile travelers reemerge before the walls of their comm with sobs of relief. Shouts from the sentries morph into cries of excitement, and when the gates open, it seems that half the comm is there to welcome home their wanderers.

"Fire-under-Earth, I haven't seen the sky in at least seven months," mutters Hjarka, her hand clasped tightly in Tonkee's, as they make their way into the city, between the throngs of amazed onlookers. Essun moves ahead, Nassun's body still cradled in her arms.

When a woman with elaborate eye makeup and a fur vest suddenly appears at the door of a yellow-X building, her mouth turns upwards into a grin.

"Shit, Essie," she exclaims, her hands on her hips as she looks the stone eater up and down. "Well, so much for ever making it up to you for downing that entire bottle of seredis on my own. Doesn't look like you could share a drink with me now if you tried."

"Yeek," replies Essun, and the woman rolls her eyes, then opens her arms to embrace Hjarka.

"And you brought back the whole crew," she grins. "Except...?"

Hjarka shakes her head warningly, then pulls away.

"We need whatever medical care we can get, though," she says, gesturing to the girl in Essun's arms, and the woman nods.

"I'll have someone take Essie to the medical building. The rest of you, go take a rusting bath, for fuck's sake. And _eat_ something—shit, I haven't seen Tonkee looking so scrawny since the Merz."

Then she turns and spots the other stone eater, and for a moment, she stares.

"Well, well," she mutters. "Essie may've lost one of her men on the journey, but she managed to pick another back up. Welcome back to Castrima, Alabaster."

And he says nothing, only follows Essun through the streets of living humans and brilliant gemstone statues, to the medical building where she sits by the bed of her child and tunes the pain out of her with a soft resonance that echoes familiarly in his ears.

Time moves differently for stone eaters. He cannot tell how long they have been there when the girl finally wakes up, her eyes blinking blearily.

"Mama?" she croaks weakly, and Essun lays a stone-cold hand on her shoulder. The stone eater's eyes flick to his, and he understands that this is a moment for privacy, so he vanishes through the floor and sesses where in the city might be best to wait.

But as soon as he has emerged from the earth, the woman called Tonkee has appeared beside him, clean and now wearing a long, billowy skirt.

"So, you're alabaster in every sense now, huh?" She examines him critically, then somewhat rudely brushes a hand against his arm without permission. " _Very_ interesting, given the type of stone you were slowly turning into. I'm guessing the chemical composition is as dramatically different as it appears? Does that mean that you were, I don't know, _catalyzed_ with something else, when that other stone eater... digested you? Gestated you? Reconfigured you? Recrystallized you? What would you say is the most accurate term for it?"

He understands implicitly that these humans are not to be harmed, so rather than turn this nosy, invasive human into gemstones, he instead drops back into the earth, determined to wait there until he is called back by Essun. There, he considers Tonkee's words. _The type of stone you were slowly turning into_ _._ He remembers emerging from the crystal, but the woman of white porcelain has told him nothing of what came before. That he was once flesh, he intuits instinctively; that he was once powerful, he also somehow understands, purely through the intensity with which the substance he does not know to call _magic_ courses through him. And these people—and the stone eater Essun—knew him back during that time.

A part of him resents that they do not take him now for what he is. But a larger part of him is curious. (Later, much later, he will learn that he always was curious, perhaps too curious for his own good.)

Finally, he sesses that Essun wants him back on the surface, and he emerges to find that the girl is now fully awake, and her traveling companions are in her room, along with the woman with the eye makeup. It is a testament to how long they all have lived among stone eaters that none of them so much as blink when he reappears without warning behind Essun mid-conversation.

"Of _course_ she can stay here, Essun, what kind of people do you think we are?" the woman with the eye makeup is scoffing, regarding the stone eater with equal parts fondness and annoyance. "No doubt you'll be back, to check in on us?"

"There is still much to do," Essun replies. The girl who so resembles her is sitting up in bed, her remaining hand resting in that of the stone eater's.

"Well, be back when you can." The woman smirks. "I know several people in this room will want to know what you've been up to."

"Not that you haven't given me enough fodder for several new tablets, already," Danel adds, "but Ykka's right. If the stonelore's going to be rewritten entirely anyway, we deserve to hear everything you've been doing."

"And you owe me some explanation for all of _this_ ," Tonkee adds, gesturing at Essun's overall stone form before jerking a thumb at the other stone eater present. "I tried asking _him_ about my current guess that some sort of metamorphic petrological process occurred, and he rusting sank into the earth without a single word and hid there for I assume the past three weeks!"

Essun looks somewhat delighted at this news, but the girl looks miserable, so she turns her attention back to her.

"Nassun."

"Yes, Mama," replies the girl tearfully.

"I was sorry for so many things already, and now I'm sorry that I have to leave you," the stone eater begins after an indecisive moment. "Especially after you've been left so many times, by so many people. But even if the Seasons are over, and the Stillness is quieter, and there will be no more need for node maintainers or for enslaving orogenes to keep the foundations of civilization from crumbling, the Earth is not yet at peace. We stone eaters must work towards reinforcing the current truce. You will be safe here, and surrounded by people who care about you. I will come back when I can. And even when I am far away, I will always, always love you."

Nassun nods, her thumb stroking the smooth stone palm beneath it.

"Hey, don't worry," says Ykka after a moment. "We'll all be looking out for her. _And_ making sure she doesn't turn any more of herself into stone. We've all witnessed enough of _that_ to last a lifetime already." Her pointed glance ricochets between both stone eaters present. "Maxixe's been training the younger roggas up well enough, and even if none of them ever come close to trying things with an obelisk, we'll fend for ourselves as well as ever."

Essun smiles.

"Thank you, Ykka," she says in the resonant softness of a stone eater's whisper. "Look after my strong, beautiful, _good_ girl, who so bravely captured the Moon and changed history for the better."

Nassun buries her face in her hand, and in a flash, Essun is gone. He can feel her pull from beneath the earth, and so he follows, not knowing where they are going. The sense of her pulling him through the ground is strangely comforting. For an odd moment, he almost feels as if they have made this journey before, their awareness linked together as they plummeted through strata and loam, two separate beings functioning as one. And, trusting her as he does implicitly—inexplicably—he lets her yoke herself to him and simply follows where she will lead.

* * *

He does not recall the world before, and so he prefers to stay ensconced in the comfort of stone. But Essun continues upwards, through the denseness of pressurized volcanic rock, up and up into the flaky schist, and finally out into the air. The ashes still swirl around her, but less densely here, where the winds of the sea have buffeted them into irregular flurries. He watches them dance around her as she stands looking back towards the continent. The waves beat a predictable, rhythmic roar against the base of the shattered stone column on which they stand, and against the spikes of stone jutting violently out from the water around them.

"There are still many, many gaps in my memories," she says finally. "Hoa warned me that some of them will take thousands of years to return, and others are lost forever, no matter how carefully he formed me. I remember Nassun's face, for example, and I remember just how painfully I love her. But I was left with so few memories of her childhood. If Hoa hadn't told me, I wouldn't even have remembered why exactly she hated me as she did." She allows herself a bitter smile, then dispels it. "One day, when she's forgiven me a bit more, I'd like to introduce you two properly. You'd like each other."

He stands, watching, as she assumes a seated position, then quirks her head at him with an expression that invites him to do the same. He ignores her and remains standing.

"I can understand why Antimony didn't think that it would be important for you to remember," Essun continues. "So much of your life was pain. And, of those you loved, I was the only one remaining to mourn the old you. In many ways, I wouldn't want you to have to remember. But, selfishly, I've missed you, 'Baster. Even if neither of us will ever really return to being who we once were, I want to spend eternity with the ornery, brilliant, infuriating old you. And I won't ever recover that, if you never know who you were."

"Who was I?" he asks.

She smiles.

"Your story... is almost beyond belief. As is my story. As is _our_ story. I would not have believed most of what Hoa told me, if something inside me had not told me that it was all _true_."

He waits patiently for her to continue, for what might have been a few seconds, for what might have been several years.

"You destroyed the world, Alabaster," Essun explains quietly. "You were powerful, and angry, and so lonely with the knowledge and responsibility that you held because of that power and anger. Everything had been taken from you, and you saw that the same thing had happened to so many others, and you took your brilliance and your fury and your pain, and you rebelled by obliterating history. Do you want to know who you were, if it means having to relive despair that intense?"

His silence speaks for him. Finally, Essun nods.

"Then goodbye, 'Baster," she tells him, her smile wistful. "One day, I hope you at least remember this place, the good parts of it. We loved each other here, once. There was happiness, too, even within the pain, and that makes it worth remembering even the things you could never forgive."

She makes no show of moving, and he is about to sink below the stone. But at the moment, faint behind the omnipresent haze of ash, the Moon looms into sight, full and brash. And he thinks about this stone eater's daughter who captured the Moon, whose mother's uncanny metamorphosis did not alter her love. Being reminded of who she was brought back the pain of her daughter's hatred, but it also created room for forgiveness, for moving forward.

Tentatively, he reaches into the schist, caressing its granular, flaky, volcanic texture with his sessipinae, grasping less with his mind than with some underlying, subconscious dimension of his self. And he does not recall fully formed _memories_ so much as _sensations_. There is indeed pain here, a pain that threatens to drag him deep within the stone and lock him there in paralyzed anguish. One day, he may have to face it fully. But once his senses have stopped flinching away from forgotten agony, he is enveloped by the sensation of warmth, of laughter, of _belonging_. And, although his recognition is not returning in snapshots so much as in washes of pure emotion, his stone figure itches suddenly with tremors of tactile memory. The comforting weight of a sleeping child in his arms. The feel of his cheek against the broad chest rising and falling beneath. His bony chin tucked snug against a shoulder, against the shoulder of...

"Syenite," he murmurs, in what might have been a sigh if he still drew breath.

When he opens his eyes, Essun is staring at him intently, and he blinks, his mouth turned down into a confused scowl.

"Not today," he tells her finally.

"Not today," she agrees. "But we have forever, after all. When you're ready, I'll tell you everything."

He nods. After a moment, she grins.

"All right, 'Baster, much as this warms my heart, stop being such a stubborn ass now. Sit down and watch the Moon rise with me."

It will be millennia before he finally recalls glimpses of sitting in this exact spot, on a blanket, in the sunshine, a child shrieking with delight as his father tossed him into the air and caught him again. For now, however, he simply obeys, and the two silently watch the sky through the ash flurries until weak sunlight sets the morning horizon aflame.


End file.
